Katie was neglected by her parents when she was a baby. During the crucial early years of her brain’s development she missed out on hundreds of hours of delightful eye-to-eye contact with her mum and dad. Instead of learning that she mattered to her parents more than anything else in the world, she was lying alone in her cot, wondering if she mattered at all. Naturally, over the first few years of her life, Katie developed a lot of anger towards the world, and a lot of shame about who she saw herself to be. When she was removed from her parents and put into foster care, she was unable to bond with any of her new foster parents, and was moved from family to family as she pushed them away with her rage.
When she was six years old Katie met Allison, a therapist who knew how to establish a strong attachment between parents and troubled children. Allison worked with Katie and her foster mum as they played together in a warm, trusting environment. She began to teach Katie how to relate to her new mother by speaking the words she knew Katie needed to say and then asking her to repeat them. Together they learnt to express her anger in non-physical ways, playfully yelling, ‘I hate you! Leave me alone!’ Then Allison would ease Katie into using quieter, more vulnerable words: ‘I don’t know how to have a mum. Can I have a hug?’ As the sessions progressed, Allison gave Katie harder words to say, words which she knew would resonate deep inside Katie: ‘I’m scared that you don’t really love me! I think I’ll always be bad!’
After one session, an observer asked, ‘That seemed great, but did Katie really mean what you told her to say?’ Allison answered: ‘What does “really mean” mean? Would Katie have said that on her own? No. Does she feel what I had her say? Not that much. But did those words resonate with a small, deeply hidden aspect of herself that needs to develop if she’s going to make it? Yes. Did those words hopefully raise a doubt and a possibility within her awareness that there might be something special in a child’s relationship with her mother? I truly hope so.’ (The psychologist Daniel Hughes tells Katie’s story in his book Building the Bonds of Attachment.)
Every Christian is learning how to relate to their Heavenly Father. We are learning about ourselves, because we so little understand our sin, our brokenness and our smallness compared to God. We are learning to accept that God loves us more than we could imagine, because we find it so hard to believe that he could welcome us with open arms. And we are learning to express the joy that often doesn’t come naturally to us, even though God has graciously given us more than we could ever ask for. One way we learn these things is by imitating the words of others, just like Katie did. But, unlike Katie, the words we are given come in the form of songs.
The Bible tells us to sing to God so that the message of Christ will dwell among us richly (Colossians 3:16). God’s intention is that the gospel message of Christ our King and Saviour would not just go in one ear and out the other, but would make its home in our hearts, forming our thoughts and feelings, and shaping our actions. This rich indwelling won’t happen just by listening to the gospel. We need to sing it. We need to give our whole being the chance to experience what it’s like to praise and pray to God with all that we are. How exactly does singing do this? I can think of five things singing does that can’t be done by reading or speaking alone.
Singing helps us to reflect on truth by imposing its own timing on us. A book about God can’t do this – we may read it as fast or as slow as we like. A preacher can try to impose their own sense of time, but after they have repeated their words a few times we start to awkwardly wish they would move on. A song, by contrast, pulls us into its time-frame, and says: ‘We are going to take the next five minutes to reflect on God’s love for us. We’re not going to hurry. Relax and enjoy God’s love.’
A song is a thought that has been encoded with emotion. Have you ever heard someone read aloud in a flat monotone? It doesn’t feel right because we don’t naturally speak on one note: when we are truly engaged by what we are saying our voices go up and down with excitement, and when we are overjoyed or angry we use the full volume and pitch range of our voices. A good song has a melody that guides us through the full range of our emotional voice.
Singing is active. When we listen to a sermon we are essentially students, passively receiving information from the preacher. But when we stand and sing we are saying with our lungs, our mouths, our facial expressions, our hands and our feet: ‘I believe this!’ Singing helps us to own the gospel truth we have heard.
Singing is unifying. We may walk the Christian journey feeling discouraged and alone, but when we stand alongside our brothers and sisters in church and we hear their voices belting out the same things that we are feeling, we are given courage. When we sing we know and feel we are not alone; we are united with God’s family.
Songs are memorable. The words of a song are much easier to remember than a sermon or even a Bible verse. Singing is the easiest and most effective way to memorise Biblical truths. A good song is a gospel message that can travel with us and help us in our daily walk.
When God told us to sing so that the message of Christ would dwell in us richly, I believe he wanted us to have times of deep reflection on the gospel and times of emotionally rich self-expression. He wanted us to actively own the gospel truth for ourselves, and to be united in this as one body. And he wanted believers to walk through life humming gospel phrases with joy and hope. Just as Katie learned to have a relationship for the first time with a mother by taking someone else’s words on her lips, God wants us to learn to relate to him by taking gospel words on our lips.
This is why we take singing seriously at our churches. I’m so thankful for our teams of musicians who set aside time to practice regularly, and often invest their money in instruments that will accompany our singing. I’m thankful for our audio teams who set up speakers and mixing desks and roll and unroll endless cables, and who listen hard so they can help the band support our singing. I’m thankful to our projection teams, who concentrate hard every Sunday to get the timing right, so we might know the words to sing. And I’m thankful most of all to everyone who stands with us on Sunday and sings from their heart. We need to learn to relate to God, and singing can help us learn. Thank you for giving this important ministry your all.
The photos shown below come from Sing The Gospel, a night of joyful singing in October, where we recorded six new songs that will be released in November.
